This extremist new position is red meat for many left-wing activists, particularly certain elements of the Hispanic voting bloc whom Democrats need to fire up and turn out on election days (as well as for self-proclaimed “citizens of the world” living in newly-fascist Britain). But is the Left’s closed information loop of outrage causing them to diverge from popular opinion at a time when conservatism is otherwise discredited and electoral gains are there for the taking? By tying themselves so closely and unapologetically to people who came to and live in the country illegally, have left-wing parties put themselves on a collision course with the electorate?

The thing is, about 10 years ago, many Democrats — including, notably, Schumer — would have championed many of the Trump administration’s enforcement proposals, from increased local cooperation with immigration enforcement to a physical barrier on the US/Mexico border, even if they weren’t part of a deal to legalize unauthorized immigrants. And they’d certainly accept them, happily, alongside legalization.

But it’s certainly true that Democrats in 2017, in general, tend to criticize the use of immigration enforcement, and tend to side with those accused of violating immigration law, as a broad matter of principle beyond opposing the particular actions of the administration.

This goes beyond simply representing members of their own communities (and potential electoral constituencies). The activist defense of immigrants caught crossing the border, especially the Central American children and families that now make up a large share of people entering the US without papers, has led Democrats to take a much firmer stance in defending them as humanitarian victims who deserve the chance to seek and receive asylum in the US.

In fact, you would be hard pressed to get a Democratic politician to name a single category of illegal immigrant whom they do not consider worthy of amnesty and eventual citizenship. Accusations of racism and oppression come easily to them, yet they are suddenly struck dumb when asked what kind of border security or immigration enforcement measures they would actually support.

And sometimes this leads the Democrats to new heights of extremism:

More broadly, Democrats are no longer as willing to attack “illegal immigration” as a fundamental problem anymore.

That rhetoric, too, came in part from DREAMers, who didn’t like being talked about as victims of their parents’ crimes who came to the US “through no fault of their own.” Instead they’ve portrayed their parents as “the original DREAMers” — a line that Nancy Pelosi followed in September when she said that DACA recipients’ parents “did a great thing” in bringing their children to the US.

Violating US immigration law is now “a great thing”, in the words of the Democratic Party Minority Leader. It is one thing to turn a blind eye to the abuse of the rule of law, as many on the Left have done for some time regarding immigration. But it is quite another thing altogether to praise that lawbreaking and hold it up as a paragon of civic virtue. This position totally undermines any remaining protestations that the Left are interested in any kind of immigration enforcement, and shows that their idea of “immigration reform” basically means unconditional amnesty with not even a token gesture for conservatives.

Lind’s article is worth reading in full, since she delves into some of the structural reasons why immigration activist voices now carry so much more weight within the Democratic Party, particularly the trade union shift from opposing illegal immigration to protect their dwindling memberships to supporting illegal immigration to boost their enrolment. But whatever the cause, the degree to which Democrats have lurched to the Left on immigration is alarming, and of concern to anybody who would like to see comprehensive reform in which amnesty is given only in exchange for a serious boost to future enforcement.

This is, to be blunt, political suicide. The Democrats’ current position seems to be that the Dreamer parents who broke the law are near heroes, indistinguishable from the children they brought with them; and their rhetoric is very hard to distinguish, certainly for most swing voters, from a belief in open borders. In fact, the Democrats increasingly seem to suggest that any kind of distinction between citizens and noncitizens is somehow racist. You could see this at the last convention, when an entire evening was dedicated to Latinos, illegal and legal, as if the rule of law were largely irrelevant. Hence the euphemism “undocumented” rather than “illegal.” So the stage was built, lit, and set for Trump.

He still tragically owns that stage. What Merkel did for the AfD, the Democrats are in danger of doing for the Trump wing of the GOP. The most powerful thing Trump said in the campaign, I’d argue, was: “If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country.” And the Democrats had no answer, something that millions of Americans immediately saw. They still formally favor enforcement of immigration laws, but rhetorically, they keep signaling the opposite.

I was also astounded when the Democrats chose to devote a large section of their 2016 party convention to sharing their stage with confessed and unrepentant illegal immigrants. Though I cannot claim to have predicted Donald Trump’s election victory, in hindsight it is clear that moments like this just killed whatever enthusiasm existed for Hillary Clinton in the key swing states which she went on to narrowly lose.

When you refuse to condemn any form of illegal immigration, make the concerns of illegal immigrants one of your main priorities (often over and above born and naturalised citizens) and actively praise their lawbreaking, you have adopted an open borders position. You just don’t possess the courage to come out and say so, for fear of the political consequences. Apparently the Democrats are quite happy to ignore the concerns of Middle America, but are not yet quite ready to publicly give them the middle finger.

It is not unreasonable for people to ask politicians and political parties who embrace illegal immigration exactly what (if any) immigration controls they would actually accept. In fact, the only reason that Democrats are not routinely put on the spot and shamed into answering this question is because a spineless, complicit Washington DC media tacitly agrees with the new extremist position (or at least is too scared of being called “racist” by social justice activists to do their job).

To be clear: the idea of deporting all (or even most) people currently living illegally in the United States is unworkable as it is cruel – many people in this position did what anyone else would have done, given their situations and the immense pull factors of demand for labour and sporadic enforcement. Moreover, many illegal immigrants have lived most of their lives in America and are effectively Americans in pectore. Many are probably model citizens. Some would likely become the best of America.

But if the rule of law means anything at all, violating US immigration law while others endured stress, incurred expense and lost time following the legal process cannot be rewarded unconditionally. Illegal immigrants should be lifted out of the shadows and freed from a fearful half-life which does nobody any good, but only after following a similar process to legal immigrants. And there must be proper border enforcement in return, so we do not end up back in the same situation in two decade’s time. Immediately upon amnesty being granted to otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants, the Left must give up their defence of sanctuary cities which make a mockery of the law. Donald Trump’s wall is overly expensive, impractical and largely pointless, but existing fencing should be fortified and new technologies deployed to stop illegal crossings. In other words, there must be a meaningful quid pro quo.

Neither side in American politics has acquitted itself very honourably when it comes to immigration reform, but at present it is the Left who are rapidly lurching toward a more extremist position, led by their activists on a collision course with a more sceptical public.

And going into the next electoral cycle, all the shrieking about Trump’s “racist” wall will not disguise the fact that the Left have something far more radical in mind.

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The list of concessions requested of the Democrats in exchange for normalising the immigration status of nearly one million people includes approving the much talked-about border wall with Mexico, hiring more Customs & Border Patrol agents, cracking down on “chain migration”, toughening asylum laws and the denial of federal grants to so-called “sanctuary cities” which deliberately limit their cooperation with federal agencies on matters relating to immigration enforcement, even when the administrative burden of doing so is minimal.

Aside from the construction of the wall – a silly waste of money given that many illegal immigrants are visa overstayers and not border jumpers, construction would damage a number of conservation areas and require the compulsory purchase of huge tracts of private land while Mexico has no intention of paying for the thing despite rash promises made by President Trump – these proposals fall into a category which might reasonably be called “perfectly sensible measures to protect the border and immigration rules of a modern, sovereign nation state”.

Of course, the Left sees it entirely differently. The New York Times bleats with alarm:

While it is unclear whether Mr. Trump views the demands as absolute requirements or the beginning of a negotiation, the proposals, taken together, amount to a Christmas-in-October wish list for immigration hard-liners inside the White House. Immigration activists have long opposed many of the proposals as draconian or even racist.

The demands were developed by a half-dozen agencies and departments, officials said. But among the officials behind the demands are Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, both of whom have long advocated extremely aggressive efforts to prevent illegal entry into the country and crack down on undocumented immigrants already here.

The demands represented a concerted effort to broaden the expected congressional debate about the Dreamers to one about overhauling the entire American immigration system — on terms that hard-line conservatives have been pursuing for decades.

In a letter to lawmakers, Mr. Trump said his demands would address “dangerous loopholes, outdated laws and easily exploited vulnerabilities” in the immigration system, asserting that they were “reforms that must be included” in any deal to address the Dreamers.

Democratic leaders in Congress reacted with alarm, saying the demands threaten to undermine the president’s own statements in which he had pledged to work across the aisle to protect the Dreamers through legislation.

The New York times is quick to define the range of views on immigration which can be described as “hard-line conservative”, but they are noticeably silent on what would constitute a hard-line leftist position on immigration reform.

One can only determine something to be hard-line conservative if one has a birds-eye view of the entire spectrum of opinion, so presumably the New York Times knows that the hard-line leftist position on immigration – the stance with which the Trump administration must negotiate – advocates fully open borders and immediate amnesty for almost anyone who manages to set foot on American soil and declare their intention to permanently remain there. Yet the Times never makes this clear to its readers, who know all about the Evil Conservative position but are not even encouraged to think specifically about what the “liberal” alternative should be.

This is entirely deliberate – the leftist worldview knows that its position on immigration, the nation state and other issues would presently be repellent to a majority of Americans if spoken out loud. Therefore, they try to circumvent public opinion and achieve their ends by riding a wave of whipped-up anger and misunderstanding of conservative positions rather than boldly and unambiguously setting out their own wish-list of demands. Thus they hope to push America toward an irreversible, de facto open borders situation without ever having to utter the words or suffer the political consequences. You might call this smart politics and an astute strategy. But it is also rank cowardice, and perpetuates a fraud on the American people.

The true extremism of the Left’s unspoken stance on immigration can be seen in their reaction to the Trump administration’s proposals. When the Trump administration first stirred outrage and condemnation by declaring his intention to end the DACA program, most Democrats and others on the Left immediately started posturing as brave defenders of vulnerable “undocumented” people, the Dreamers’ last line of defence against an evil, racist Republican attack. One would therefore think that given that the Dreamers are supposedly the top priority of the American Left, they would agree to any compromise on immigration which promised to enshrine the permanent legal status of these people.

But you would think wrong. In their response to the Trump administration, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s joint statement read as follows:

The Administration can’t be serious about compromise or helping the Dreamers if they begin with a list that is anathema to the Dreamers, to the immigrant community and to the vast majority of Americans.

We told the President at our meeting that we were open to reasonable border security measures alongside the DREAM Act, but this list goes so far beyond what is reasonable. This proposal fails to represent any attempt at compromise.

The list includes the wall, which was explicitly ruled out of the negotiations. If the President was serious about protecting the Dreamers, his staff has not made a good faith effort to do so.

The statement conveniently ignores the fact that the Trump proposal would give the Dreamers exactly what they wanted – a pathway to permanent residency in the United States, and freedom from gnawing, perpetual uncertainty over their futures. The Democrats’ issue is not that the proposal fails to “help the Dreamers”. Their issue is that they do not get any of the many other things on their leftist immigration wishlist along with the bargain.

But that doesn’t sound quite so noble in a statement. In fact, it sounds rather grasping and selfish. So from a PR perspective it is much better to prance around pretending that the proposal is some kind of grave insult or threat to the sympathetic Dreamers, when in fact the proposal would give the Dreamers exactly what they want but leave Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi empty-handed when it comes to their desire to further erode national borders. The public are far more likely to support Dreamers who they have been told are being threatened than they are to come out in defence of the Utopian open-borders fantasies of leftist academics, politicians and donors.

And since when has a policy being “anathema” to non-citizens without the legal right to reside in the United States been considered sufficient cause to reject it out of hand? Will the Democrats cheerfully go to bat for me if I, a British citizen, decide to take offence at US fiscal or education policy? It hardly seems likely. Is it not enough that this immigration compromise (flawed though it may presently be because of the administration’s insistence on an ineffective wall) would ensure the legal status of Dreamers? Apparently not – because even though it would assuage their primary concern about the risk of deportation, increased border security is apparently anathema to Dreamers and the “immigrant community” for whom the Democrats arrogantly claim to speak.

Debate about the merits of the wall aside, the present impasse is being fuelled almost entirely by Democrats and those on the Left, insistent as they are on getting 100 percent of what they want, despite controlling neither the White House or either house of Congress. They claim to care about the Dreamers, but ultimately are willing to throw every last one of them under the bus by walking away from negotiations unless they are able to extract something further from the Republicans to aid in their push for fully open borders.

And if this accusation sounds harsh, let it be refuted in detail by the American Left. Let them publicly state even one restriction that they would be happy to keep or impose in the name of border security or immigration control, instead of prancing around and flaunting their boundless compassion. Even if Donald Trump and the Republicans were negotiating in a genuine spirit of compromise and good faith – which I will concede is unlikely, based on past behaviour – how can agreement possibly be reached with a side which denounces any attempt to enforce the border as “racist” and conspicuously fails to articulate its own preferred outcome?

After having seen conservatives criticised endlessly by the Left for supposedly using young illegal immigrants as political pawns, what is shocking here is that it is Democrats, not just Republicans, who appear willing to hold the fortunes of Dreamers hostage in attempt to get their way on immigration reform.

If the Democrats actually wanted to do the right thing by Dreamers instead of cynically using them as an emotional prop for their argument, they would hammer out a deal with Donald Trump which conceded to all of the administration’s demands with the exception of the wall, and come up with some compromise there involving the strengthening of fencing and electronic border surveillance. But they won’t. The Left would rather screw the Dreamers and hold out for 100 percent of what they want rather than agree to a compromise which enhances future immigration control in any way.

And this is the uncomfortable truth: For some on the Left, the Dreamers are not people to be sincerely sympathised with and helped toward legal status, but merely a convenient resource to be exploited in the service of achieving their ultimate goal of open borders.

This is not smart politics. And it certainly ain’t compassion for the “undocumented”, either.

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So I was raised a secular liberal. My college professors were secular liberals. During my journalism phase, my newspaper colleagues were secular liberals. My law school professors and peers were – in the vast majority – secular liberals. Almost everyone at my corporate law firm was a secular liberal. My California neighbors and friends are secular liberals, as are my colleagues. My mother, siblings, and their spouses are all secular liberals.

By all rights, I should be a member in good standing of their tribe, “liking” their Facebook posts and joining their candlelight vigils against the evil Trump Administration. But November 8 and its aftermath revealed to me that I am just so tired of these people. I can’t be like them, and I don’t want my kids turning into them.

I am tired of their undisguised contempt for tens of millions of Americans, with no effort to temper their response to the election with humility or empathy.

I am tired of their unexamined snobbery and condescension.

I am tired of their name-calling and virtue-signaling as signs of supposedly high intelligence.

I am tired of their trendiness, jumping on every left-liberal bandwagon that comes along (transgender activism, anyone?) and then acting like anyone not on board is an idiot/hater.

I am tired of their shallowness. It’s hard to have a deep conversation with people who are obsessed with moving their kids’ pawns across the board (grades, sports, college, grad school, career) and, in their spare time, entertaining themselves and taking great vacations.

I am tired of their acceptance of vulgarity and sarcastic irreverence as the cultural ocean in which their kids swim. I like pop culture as much as the next person, but people who would never raise their kids on junk food seem to think nothing of letting then wallow in cultural junk, exposed to nothing ennobling, aspirational, or even earnest.

I am tired of watching them raise clueless kids (see above) who go off to college and within months are convinced they live in a rapey, racist patriarchy; “Make America Great Again” is hate speech; and Black Lives Matter agitators are their brothers-in-arms against White Privilege. If my kids are like that at nineteen, I’ll feel I’ve seriously failed them as a parent. Yet the general sentiment seems to be these are good, liberal kids who may have gotten a bit carried away.

I am tired of their lack of interest in any form of serious morality or self-betterment. These are decent, responsible people, many compassionate by temperament. Yet they seem two-dimensional, as if they believe that being a nice, well-socialized person who holds the correct political views is all there is, and there is nothing else to talk about. Isn’t there, though?

I am tired of being bored and exasperated by everybody. I feel like I have read this book a thousand times, and there are no surprises in it. Down with Trump! Trans Lives Matter! Climate deniers are destroying the planet! No cake, we’re gluten-free!

These are good people in a lot of ways. But there has got to be a better tribe.

It must be disturbing to “wake up” like this and realise that you are no longer fully in communion with your tribe, so kudos to Rod Dreher’s reader for putting into words something that cannot be easy to admit. With the wounds of the 2016 presidential election still raw, many on the American Left have little time for doubters, and admitting a heresy such as this would likely be met not with understanding (let alone introspection) but rather with intolerance and fury.

The scene that comes to my mind is from the film American History X, where protagonist Derek Vinyard, serving a jail sentence for the racist-motivated murder of a black car thief, realises the flaws of his white supremacist worldview while in prison and is then utterly unable to engage with that community – his only source of friendship and support – after his release. Eventually, Vinyard confronts the group’s leader and explicitly rejects their racist ideology, at which point they chase him out of their camp.

Increasingly, one has to either buy the whole regressive leftist agenda or none of it at all. Because it is couched in such explicitly moral terms, with any departure from orthodoxy seen as a moral failure, to question just one aspect of the worldview – the identity politics, the environmentalism, the statist paternalism – is to make oneself persona non grata within that community. Imagine the pain of realising that you no longer believe every article in the leftist gospel, and then being faced either with the prospect of admitting your heresy and being actively shunned by family, friends and colleagues, or else keeping your opposition quiet and living a lie.

The American Left has, with too few exceptions, given up on trying to win by persuasion, seeking instead to achieve victory by shaming and bullying dissenters into a sullen, resentful silence. That approach is no longer working and delivering benefits, to the extent that it ever did. When people like Rod Dreher’s reader are leaving the tribe in disgust at the sanctimonious echo chamber of questionable values then clearly something has gone wrong.

None of this is to say that American conservatism is in fine fettle – clearly not, as this blog has repeatedly warned. The fact that Republicans have closed ranks behind a profoundly authoritarian and un-conservative President-elect Donald Trump is evidence of the challenge faced by small-C conservatives in trying to maintain their influence and steer the Trump presidency away from endless pitfalls.

But it is the slow-burning revolution on the Left (particularly the growing elitism and the lethal embrace of identity politics) which fed the populist Right to the extent that Donald Trump won the White House. And until the American Left learns to moderate its many excesses and accept ideological diversity together with all the other kinds of diversity they champion, they will continue to alienate crucial allies and accelerate their march into irrelevance.

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Besides my weekly newsletter from hilarious SJW site Everyday Feminism, the thing which brings me most pleasure in American political life at the moment is reading twice-weekly dispatch from Lenny, Lena Dunham’s online collaboration with Jenni Konner which can best be described as “social justice for the 0.1 percent”.

Here you can find an surefire antidote to whatever scraps of self-awareness and contrition may be emerging from other, more humble parts of the American Left. Here, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were beyond reproach at all times, and it was America (specifically those ignorant, self-hating white, working class women who had the temerity to vote for Donald Trump) who let Hillary down, not vice versa.

The first thing you need to understand: commanded by their cult of identity politics, they were really deeply invested in Hillary Clinton as a person. As Lenny contributor Virginia Heffernan put it:

When people told me they hated Hillary Clinton or (far worse) that they were “not fans,” I wish I had said in no uncertain terms: “I love Hillary Clinton. I am in awe of her. I am set free by her. She will be the finest world leader our galaxy has ever seen.”

I want to reverse the usual schedule of things, then. We don’t have to wait until she dies to act. Hillary Clinton’s name belongs on ships, and airports, and tattoos. She deserves straight-up hagiographies and a sold-out Broadway show called RODHAM. Yes, this cultural canonization is going to come after the chronic, constant, nonstop “On the other hand” sexist hedging around her legacy. But such is the courage of Hillary Clinton and her supporters; we reverse patriarchal orders. Maybe she is more than a president. Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself. The presidency is too small for her. She belongs to a much more elite class of Americans, the more-than-presidents. Neil Armstrong, Martin Luther King Jr., Alexander Fucking Hamilton.

Hillary Clinton did everything right in this campaign, and she won more votes than her opponent did. She won. She cannot be faulted, criticized, or analyzed for even one more second. Instead, she will be decorated as an epochal heroine far too extraordinary to be contained by the mere White House.

Yes, maybe Hillary Clinton is light itself. Anyway, you get the idea.

Strangely, nearly to the last person, each writers seems to have been personally committed not to the Democratic Party or left-wing ideals, but to Hillary Clinton herself, as Meena Harris admits:

I joined the Pantsuit Nation Facebook group early on, when its simple but brilliant purpose was to get as many women as possible to wear a pantsuit on Election Day in support of Hillary Clinton. In the weeks preceding the election, Pantsuit Nation became more than a modest call for a show of solidarity on a single day — it became a vibrant and uplifting community of millions of women and allies demonstrating their commitment to Hillary. It truly was a “safe space,” something that seems increasingly rare on the Internet. It affirmed the hope, love, kindness, and support we all are capable of when we come together to fight for something we believe in. It elevated the values embodied in Hillary’s campaign and proved that, indeed, we are stronger together.

My emphasis in bold.

Perhaps this is why it is so hard for the Lennyists to come to terms with Donald Trump’s victory. The rest of America, not inducted into the Clinton personality cult, didn’t realise that they were supposed to base their vote on the blinkered hero-worship of a flawed candidate.

And so while some on the American Left are busy working their way through the five stages of grief and trying to accept that openly despising half the country is not a good route to electoral success, the people at Lenny are doing the opposite – surrounding themselves with likeminded people (even more than usual, if that were possible) and actively seeking out situations and social settings which in no way challenge their existing assumptions and beliefs.

As editor-in-chief Jessica Grose confesses:

It’s been two weeks now. I am falling asleep decently well, but I wake up around three each morning with a start, as if the specter of Trump is chasing me in my subconscious. Then I have trouble falling back asleep after I remember that yes, he really is our president-elect. While we must continue to stay on guard, to stay active, to stay angry, I wanted to write about the times I have felt peace: when I have been in the company of raucous women.

One was a meeting of fellow moms from my daughter’s preschool. We met to discuss a book at a bar, but we ended up talking about our dashed presidential dreams, how to teach our sons and daughters about consent, and who had done (or would do) ayahuasca (answer: would never; am not interested in hallucinating while having explosive diarrhea).

The other was at a shiva for the father of a dear friend. Five women — some of whom had never met before — sat around a living room in Queens, admired foxy photographs of the deceased from his Speedo-wearing youth, revealed our salaries to each other, and argued over whether a sincere belief in chemtrails was a relationship deal-breaker (answer: it depends).

What these meetings had in common was that I felt fully myself and utterly accepted in each grouping. Finding your people, and your solace, in moments of stress and strife is something we’re emphasizing in this week’s issue.

Yes. Reacting to Donald Trump’s election victory by retreating further into the bubble, seeking the company of fellow power moms who sit around discussing the latest fashionable hallucinatory weekend escape and giving their young sons “consent lessons” so that they are no longer tempted to embark on a raping spree across Manhattan, as they would otherwise doubtless be.

These people do not have the slightest interest in learning about the America they actually inhabit, and so when faced with a difficult outcome they simply refuse to accept it, cocooning themselves off with other like-minded people. As private citizens, that might be okay (if still an immature and fragility-creating way for adults to behave). But as supposed writers and journalists, it is an unforgivable dereliction of duty.

Into the bubble. Deeper and deeper…

Meanwhile back in the real world, president-elect Trump continues to wage war on the media and pick his cabinet.

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Wealthy Liberal donors to the Democratic Party are debating whether to double down on their identity politics and victimhood culture-based strategy or to attempt meaningful outreach to the white working classes whom they so conspicuously cut adrift in 2016

And so the post-election autopsy begins, as analysts slice open the carcass of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign and methodically pick through the vital organs to determine what possible failure allowed a well-funded presidential campaign that has effectively been running for over a decade to go down in flaming defeat at the hands of Donald Trump.

Politico reports that the hilariously named Democracy Alliance (a group of mega-rich Democratic Party donors using their wealth to tilt the scales of genuine democracy every bit as much as the “evil” Koch brothers) is holding an emergency meeting at the Washington DC Mandarin Oriental hotel to thrash out the issues:

George Soros and other rich liberals who spent tens of millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton are gathering in Washington for a three-day, closed door meeting to retool the big-money left to fight back against Donald Trump.

The conference, which kicked off Sunday night at Washington’s pricey Mandarin Oriental hotel, is sponsored by the influential Democracy Alliance donor club, and will include appearances by leaders of most leading unions and liberal groups, as well as darlings of the left such as House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairman Keith Ellison, according to an agenda and other documents obtained by POLITICO.

The meeting is the first major gathering of the institutional left since Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in last week’s presidential election, and, if the agenda is any indication, liberals plan full-on trench warfare against Trump from Day One. Some sessions deal with gearing up for 2017 and 2018 elections, while others focus on thwarting President-elect Trump’s 100-day plan, which the agenda calls “a terrifying assault on President Obama’s achievements — and our progressive vision for an equitable and just nation.”

However, there are now murmurings of discontent among some of the Democrats present, who claim that persisting with the same tired, clapped out old ideas and electoral strategies will not reverse their sliding fortunes:

Yet the meeting also comes as many liberals are reassessing their approach to politics — and the role of the Democracy Alliance, or DA, as the club is known in Democratic finance circles. The DA, its donors and beneficiary groups over the last decade have had a major hand in shaping the institutions of the left, including by orienting some of its key organizations around Clinton, and by basing their strategy around the idea that minorities and women constituted a so-called “rising American electorate” that could tip elections to Democrats.

That didn’t happen in the presidential election, where Trump won largely on the strength of his support from working-class whites. Additionally, exit polls suggested that issues like fighting climate change and the role of money in politics — which the DA’s beneficiary groups have used to try to turn out voters — didn’t resonate as much with the voters who carried Trump to victory.

“The DA itself should be called into question,” said one Democratic strategist who has been active in the group and is attending the meeting. “You can make a very good case it’s nothing more than a social club for a handful wealthy white donors and labor union officials to drink wine and read memos, as the Democratic Party burns down around them.”

This blog (and many others) have already written extensively that the cynical decision by the Democrats and the American Left in general to wage a relentless identity politics war against the Right is not only misguided, but actively polarising the country, as continued efforts to label working class white people as privileged “oppressors” will only further encourage them to form into a cohesive identity group of their own – the very one which elected Donald Trump as the next president.

Obsessing endlessly about the politics of race, gender and sexuality at a time when many Americans are either suffering economically or teetering on the brink of real economic insecurity is a privilege only available to the type of people who meet at the Mandarin Oriental to naively ask one another how anybody could possibly not have wanted Hillary Clinton to be the next president. To anybody else, the narrow interests and shrill, hectoring tone of the Democratic Party are an irrelevance at best and a source of supreme annoyance and alienation at worst.

People living in towns decimated by the loss of skilled manufacturing don’t want to be told that it is actually a good thing that their air pollution-causing factory closed down and took their job with it, or that they are borderline racists and bigots for not immediately adopting the latest social justice buzzwords spewing out of the university system. Yet the Democrats had little of value to say to the white working classes, the candidate herself clearly much more at home among the Wall Street and progressive celebrity class, spending the night before the election partying with the likes of Beyoncé rather than showing any empathy for struggling voters in the so-called rust belt.

Unfortunately, other delegates seem so wedded to the present profile of the Democratic Party that they believe that change is neither necessary nor desirable.

The Politico report continues:

“We should not learn the wrong lesson from this election,” said the operative, pointing out that Clinton is on track to win the popular vote and that Trump got fewer votes than the last GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. “We need our people to vote in greater numbers. For that to happen, we need candidates who inspire them to go to the polls on Election Day.”

In other words – keep pursuing the SJW vote, even though many of these people have proven that the limit of their political activism is sharing a smug little meme on social media rather than taking the trouble to actually walk to their local polling place and participate in democracy.

This is abysmal advice, not only because it places the future hopes of the Democrats on the shoulders of people who have never once come through for the party, while many of those young people who were politically engaged are probably still smarting from the party’s frantic efforts to thwart Bernie Sanders and allow the coronation of Hillary Clinton as the eventual presidential candidate. That’s one very valid reason, but the other reason is that no party should actively seek to write off the votes of such a large constituency as the white working class. Even if the Democrats could win without the core of America, what does it say about the party that they don’t even bother with meaningful outreach?

Of course, one could level exactly the same criticism at the Republican Party, who for too long have been more than happy to cede the black and growing Hispanic vote largely to the Democrats rather than highlighting the many ways that conservative policy actually often meshes far more closely with some of their concerns (e.g. the Hispanic focus on the family). Indeed, the 2012 Growth & Opportunity Project report outlined a path toward better engagement with these communities and might have started to pay dividends in 2016 had the party not decided to tear it up and focus on complete obstructionism toward Barack Obama instead.

But while it is undeniable that the Republican Party has serious issues of its own – not only relating to minority outreach, but also a more fundamental question of how much to accommodate or push back against president-elect Trump’s authoritarian, big government instincts – it is the Democrats who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and who twice in two decades managed to lose a presidential election despite winning the national popular vote. The onus is on the Democrats first and foremost to work out what they stand for in 2016.

More encouraging than the billionaire talking shop underway at the Mandarin Oriental – a sign of just how disconnected the modern Democratic Party has become from its former roots – is defeated primary candidate Bernie Sanders’ efforts to wrest control of the party away from the dull, visionless centrists who have nothing to offer once you strip away the thin veneer of jealous identity politics.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential bid are seizing on Democratic disarray at the national level to launch a wave of challenges to Democratic Party leaders in the states.

The goal is to replace party officials in states where Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton during the acrimonious Democratic primary with more progressive leadership. But the challenges also represent a reckoning for state party leaders who, in many cases, tacitly supported Clinton’s bid.

“I think the Bernie people feel very strongly that they were abused, somehow neglected during the primary process and the conventions,” said Severin Beliveau, a former Maine Democratic Party chairman who supported Sanders in the primary. “In Maine, for instance, where Bernie got 70 percent of the caucus vote, they are emboldened and in effect want to try to replace [Maine Democratic Party chairman] Phil Bartlett, who supported Clinton.”

[..] The movement outside Washington to install new leadership — especially new leaders whose progressive credentials include support for Sanders’ presidential bid — mirrors the battle in the nation’s capital for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship in the wake of the devastating Clinton defeat and congressional elections where Democrats failed to win back either the House or the Senate. Sanders has endorsed Rep. Keith Ellison, leading House progressive and a prominent backer of his presidential campaign, to be the next permanent DNC chairman.

While this blog disagrees with Bernie Sanders on nearly everything, Hillary Clinton’s defeated primary opponent does at least correctly identify many of modern America’s ailments and propose more authentically (if flawed) left-wing solutions to them. And one can plausibly argue that Sanders has a greater ability to reach out to unionised or working class America than Clinton displayed (though one can only wistfully imagine how much better Joe Biden would have been in this role).

Better still, Bernie Sanders seemed to have comparatively little time for peddling in divisive identity politics. Rather than seeking to fracture America into a thousand competing victimhood groups, each one jealously guarding its own unique set of grievances against the common oppressor, Sanders has consistently more interested in the wealth divisions in society. And while playing rich and poor off against one another in quite such an overt way as the openly socialist Sanders comes with its own set of problems, on balance it is probably much less harmful to the fabric of America than seeking to divide and stoke up fear based on race, gender or sexuality.

Indeed, the fact that Bernie Sanders frequently found himself on the wrong side of Black Lives Matter and the gun control lobby only proves his resonance with the great core of working class America rather than the ultra-progressives. If only Sanders didn’t hug the S-word (socialism) quite so tightly in a country where people are (rightly, in this blog’s view) raised to be automatically suspicious of it, he might have prevailed over Clinton in the primary and taken the fight to Donald Trump on a number of very different fronts.

In short, as during the primary season, none of the options facing the Democratic Party are greatly appealing. Having taken conspicuously little interest in white working class concerns throughout the 2016 presidential election cycle, any efforts to restart outreach will be met with scepticism at first, and take time to pay dividends.

But for their own sake, the Democrats must persist. The alternative – doubling down on their toxic identity politics strategy and continuing to carve America up into competing victim groups and seeking to make them all fear the Evil Republicans – will only inspire an equal and opposite reaction among America’s largest minority group, the white working class.

In 2016, this strategy brought us president-elect Donald Trump. Do the Democrats really want to roll the dice and bet that the same inputs will deliver a better outcome in 2020?